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God Save The UK Developer?
Thanks to TotalGames.net for its GamesTM-reprinted feature on the alleged fall of the British game developer. The piece argues: "It all used to be so different in the Eighties. Ignoring any rose-tinted arguments about whether games back then were better, worse or more peanut butter-flavoured, the inarguable statement can be made that they were certainly more British." But now, even though "the most popular game of this new decade - Grand Theft Auto - is British, despite all of Rockstar's attempts to hide the fact", the piece laments the lack of distinctive UK games with Python-esque worldwide impact: "Of course, it doesn't cost £5 million to pick up a pen and start writing a sketch about parrots, but surely the odd very obviously British game could be smuggled through?"
Black & White 2
Fable
BC
The Movies
And that's just from _one_ UK group....
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Personally, I'd love to see a London version of GTA3 like they did with the original GTA.
They could probably buy the 3d map of London of the people who did The Getaway. Didn't they spend something 3 years creating a map of London and then wasted it on a terrible game?
The BBC has a similar story from a year ago...Peter Molyneux suggesting government help for up and coming game studios, similar to the way the film council helps the British movie industry.
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
All the games I played on my Apple //gs were American.
All the NES games I enjoyed were Japanese.
All the arcade games I've ever enjoyed were Japanese or American.
And every game I've ever enjoyed enough to buy since the NES days have been Japanese, or in quite a few isolated cases, American. The only European games I've ever bought or enjoyed were PC RPGs, the occasional DOS shareware shmup, or ASM demos (not really games). Not to troll, but as an American, I've just never noticed first-hand the influence that British game development has supposedly had on the industry. I don't doubt that the British are proud of their gaming heritage, but like the Belgian comic scene, it's something that the rest of the world could easily have ignored, despite any supposed quality. Overshadowed by dominant forces elsewhere, I guess.
Having two passports is not the only privilege I enjoy, I also am able to appreciate British humor, Faulty Towers, The Office, etc, that many here in the states simply don't "get".
Could this be the case with games too? Many aspects of British culture seem to completely go over many Americans heads....
When are we going to see a cricket game from EA?
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Great game, Python inspired...defintely.
[Rare is] about the only British developer rich enough to risk alienating a few Yanks
It's true. If you want to tap into the Nation of Consumers, you have to dumb down your game to their lowest-common-denominator tastes. Or you can create a cultural gem of a game and starve.
Perhaps what we need are a few loss leaders. Revolution are giving away Beneath A Steel Sky, with its undeniably British sense of humour.
Does my bum look big in this?
The majority of the open-source games that I've contributed significant quantities of code to have had Europe-based teams, even though I live in the US.
:-) God, why haven't the Brits taken over the world on the strength of that accent alone?
I just stopped adding code to another open source Linux game put out by a UK developer to read Slashdot.
As for commercial games, what about LionHead Studios (Black & White, and one of the nicer game development boards out there)?
One of the most influential games to hit the PC in a long time, Max Payne was developed by Mobius Entertainment, which is UK-based.
Finally, I agree that it's a shame that the UK-based Bullfrog isn't around any more, but they *were* responsible for one of only about three Windows-based games I ever purchased -- Syndicate.
I do wish that games used more British voice actors, especially female. Ah, British accents.
Maybe some of it is that (traditionally) computers were rather expensive in the UK. This may have gone away out over the last ten years, but I remember being absolutely appalled at what a number of computer types had to pay for their equipment in the UK. It takes a while to get over a lack of cheap hardware -- I think a lot of people start out game development on a home computer, so you feel the echos for years if people have older hardware. Also, what was with the whole Acorn thing?
May we never see th
Most popular game? Oh you mean CS... um I don't think it's british.
When I was in Britain the people seemed kind of depressed, I think that might be why they don't make games.
Yeah your right about The Getaway, what a terrible waste of time. I could see that gameplay was going to be a stinker from the start though (from the very first interviews it's clear they had no compelling gameplay-focused direction). I've been wondering about that since the games release. Granted it's not the best version ever (the version in MSR/Gotham Racing was far better IMO), but surely the companies who develop these games would want to sell the map data to other developers?
I mean it's a hell of a lot of work to build these maps and I can see it could be worth it if your going to hang on to them to release in future games (as MSR (origional title on the Dreamcast) has done with Gotham Racing 1 & 2), but with a title like The Getaway, if they don't plan on re-using and/or selling the map data, I think a manager on the project should be asking themselves why they want to go to so much bother to create a large urban environment modeled on a real life city. Surely it would be lot easier to just have an entirely fabricated layout that just had a similar feel to the city it's intended to represent (ala the GTA or Driver series).
I've actually recognised parts of New York and San Fransico and London from games and used them for navigation in these cities (specifically on the maps I'd played in MSR/Gotham Racing/which although they have been altered slightly to allow greater playbility, are otherwise excellent representations). I also recognised a few of the more well known areas of Toyko in the recent Bill Murray film Lost in Translation, because I'd seen at least two or three of the locations in MSR. I live in London and certainly think these maps are realistic, and it would be great to have access to them in other games genres (Tom Clancy Rainbow 6 style single player games, Counter Stike style multiplayer games, GTA/Driver style games, even old fashioned RPG/point and click adventure games) and of course I'm sure they could be useful for other recreational purposes such as tourism and even local planning authorities might have an interest (the police too very possibly, for practicing crowd control, crime prevention, courter-terrorist scenarios, etc).
I wouldn't be at all surprised if a company took take up making and maintaining maps of the central areas of large ubran cities with a view to reselling the data for just these purposes, though I think they'd need to have other primary sources of income too, as it's hard to see their being enough money in it in the short or even medium term. I expect that if a corporation doesn't a comminuty effort would though. It would probably be a lot easier for a community effort to provide up to date images for accurate textures too (something that's very easy for anyone with even a cheap digital camera), and to report recent changes, even provide photographs of streets to help mappers in expanding the maps (as obviously existing physical maps alone don't give nearly enough information).
Look at Startopia-British humour, social commentary, excellent gameplay, and sweet fuck all in the way of support or marketing from the publisher ( a recurring trend with all of Muckyfoot's games that would lead to them closing down last November)
How about Giants:Citizen Kabuto? Possibly the funniest game ever made, innovative genre mixing, and a marketing budget of 5 quid.
I live in Guildford, and 4 years ago it probably had more development houses per capita than any other place in the world. Now half of have gone, despite putting out good products (we'll ignore Blade 2), or disappeared up their own arses into creative limbo, and in the main IMO it's the publishers who can be blamed.
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Elite, Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Tomb Raider, GTA series, Carmageddon, MUD, Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye, Starfox, Barbarian, Syndicate, X-Com, Shogun/Medieval:Total War, Dizzy series, Monty Mole series, to name a few
IMO, there are very few US developers (Origin at their prime, Looking Glass Studios) who can compete with the best of Britain in terms of innovation.
Like in Japan, the most successful US developers, such as Blizzard, are those who take an unoriginal concept and polish it
In Britain, the most successful developers were those who developed new genres
BTW, you can keep Derek Smart. We REALLY don't want him back.
Or rugby. I remember a lot of "extreme football" type games over the years, but not rubgy.
There have been some good British interactive fiction games. The kind of dry, highbrow "English humor" goes nicely with a text-based format. (Speaking of which, while Spiderweb Software isn't UK-based, does anyone else think that they do a nice job of dark English-style humor? If it weren't for American spellings, I would have thought that the Exile series had British roots.)
One could say that the flood of LoTR takeoffs ow a certain something to the Brits.
Finally, I wonder whether I'm just being a bit over-stereotypical. I mean, there is a "British feel", sure. But how often does that come out in games? I mean, say a game is developed in the United States. Is there really an "American feel" to it? What would an "American feel" be? It doesn't seem that games developed in a nation tend to always stick with the stereotypical feel of that nation. If I had to put forward a few guesses, and try to avoid all the cultural mixing and people moving from one country to the other and whatnot, I'd say that:
* The Japanese seem to do more games with intense personal sacrifice. They seem to use energy weapons (the sort of thing with big fancy beams) in their games more. Soldiers in Japanese games seem to focus on duty, and not on a malfunctioning institution or the individual culture. The Japanese seem to frequently use acronyms (for organizations, military branches, vehicles, weapons, etc). Military uniforms are often more stylish and ornamental than depictions of real uniforms (I have heard that this may derive from the same place anime culture does -- the wildly different hair and clothing colors are to assist viewers in distinguishing between different characters in a nation where many people are of the same race -- a harder task than in the US). I see less topical games, fewer set in present time, and more in either the past or the future.
* The US seem to have more conventional weapons -- I know that the "US gun culture" is probably a bit exaggerated in attempts to pigeonhole the US, but we go for a broad variety of real weapons in a lot of games, and like thumps and thuds. A lot of US-based games seem to focus on soldiers at an individual level -- perhaps four people -- and point out their individuality, rather than their military roles. Dysfunctional institutions seem to play a greater role. Uniforms are toned down, and more often realistic depictions. I see a lot of games set in the present day.
* The UK is very, very different when it comes to weapons. Perhaps it's just because fewer folks are marching around with guns than in the US, but weaponry is often much lighter. (While this is a movie, I still experience a minor bit of culture shock every time I see Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. The deal that was made over the machine gun, the deal made over obtaining two shotguns, and the fact that knives played a role were so different from US movies, where it's a good bet that the mercenaries would have been carrying a rocket launcher and blown something up.) I think that there's a greater tendancy to do dry humor, and I think that most would agree (see my example of Spiderweb Software's Exile series for an example of a non-UK game series that has similar style). It may be me just me trying too hard to find differences, but I'd say that UK games have a greater tendancy to include more subtle cultural styles in factions in their games. I think that there are fewer games relying on absolutely split-second twitch elements, and somewhat more puzzle-like elements. The military seems to stay more out of British games.
Now, I'm sure to draw criticism. Yes, I'm trying to extrapolate from an extremely small sample set, but these are admittedly based on feeling and opinion rather than a full-blown study. Furthermnore, there are individual counterexamples to all of these. Bungie, Shiny Entertainment, and Spiderweb Software both put out games that I'd consid
May we never see th
IMO, there are very few US developers (Origin at their prime, Looking Glass Studios) who can compete with the best of Britain in terms of innovation.
:-)
I really wonder. Is it because the British just happen to come up with a lot of original ideas? While it's not impossible, I'm a little dubious. I wonder if perhaps it's because you have a lot of developers that are physically isolated from the mass of US and Japanese developers, and have a chance to go their own ways.
Perhaps the real answer to game diversity is to find a couple of islands, dump game developers on them without access to the outside world for a couple of years, and see what new things spring up.
Knowledge sharing is good, as it allows building upon past mistakes and god ideas. However, I claim that what is "apparently better" may not always actually be better. Someone may have to make an apparently non-ideal mental path to arrive at a better final solution. The problem is that if there are lots of ideas floating around that are "apparently better" and lead someone away from finding alternate, potentially better solutions.
Every time I see a game developer say "Has $FANCY_WELL_SELLING_GAME-style $FEATURE" on a new game's featurelist, I've seen a developer not run out and come up with a potentially better solution.
Oh, well. Honestly, people complain about the lack of innovation in games, but I can't help but think that things are better now than in the console days of the NES/SNES. Man, there were enough cloned platform games out there to choke a horse...
May we never see th
...for games. After all, cricket, pub crawls and football riots, while interesting concepts for games, probably don't appeal to the vast majority of consumers 8-)
*runs*
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Planet Moon Studios, the guys who did Giants: Citizen Kabuto, released a game for PC and Xbox recently called Armed and Dangerous. Both Giants and A&D have more than their share of wacky comedy, most of which can be classified as "British humour." In A&D, you have a gun that shoots sharks, a bomb that flips everyone upside down, health packs in the form of teacups, and so on, plus oddball characters like those from Giants. If you want more British humor in games, maybe you should go out and support these guys. They seem to be the only ones putting a distinct cultural spin on their games.
Or you can always fire up the old Amstrad CPC emulator and play a little bit of "How to be a Complete Bastard." I've never played it, but what a great name.
Scratched Emulsion
But the parent comment said he didn't remember any British games, there was no mention of a time frame.
I'd buy it though.
In fact, more to the point, when are we going to see an accurate, real-time coarse fishing game? Now that's British.
When John Cleese first wrote the Dead Parrot sketch, it was about a toaster (based on a real-life experience he'd had trying to return a defective toaster). Graham Chapman listened to Clesse read it and told him it'd be funnier if it were a dead parrot instead.
Just so you know
So while it may not take 5 million to create a sketch about dead parrots, it does take talent.
The Worms creators are still at it, Worms 3D gets released in a handful of days...
(Team17 is based in Osset, UK).
MORTAR COMBAT!
i'm british & dammit, this is amusing.
This articles is just incredibly bad. They cite 6 or 7 "classic games" as evidence of the millions of games developers that once spewed out billions of digital children, when in reality that was the case in most countries - the computer gaming world used to consists of lots more teeny developers.
Besides, nobody cares which country developers come from anyway - as long as they make good games, you should be happy. The Brits (which include myself) are no more innovative than any other country, and even if they were it was not due to any sort of "British" sense of humour. Innovation comes from companies willing to take risks, and Monty Python sucks.
Granted it didn't introduce any radically new play elements and had a really bad ending... But as an experience of an interactive cartoon, it was fun and at the very least, DIFFERENT then the normal pablum put out today.
But I agree with you on everything else.
I think the great British games industry was built on many factors, but accessiblity of development technology was a major factor. Most games could be knocked out by a couple of teenagers in their parents house. The ZX81 and ZX spectrum home computers (Dragon, Commodore 64) created a whole generation of hackers and many developers in the IT industry owe their start to these amazing machines. People now demand more from their games and development involves a multi-talented team. So the best British developers get lured to the states. The Romans grabbed their labour with chains, the US Empire grabs them with fat contracts and the California sun.
So yes the British games industry will be like the British film industry with its occassional success and a few British 'actors' starring in blockbusters but essentially the US will always have the finance and its pick of talent from home and abroad.
I couldn't let a debate on the UK gaming scene go by without mentioning a real British gem... UPLINK, by a tiny outfit called Introversion Software. Small outfits may be dying out but this is a reminder that, if you have a good idea and keep it simple, the size of the team doesn't matter. Check it out here
Good games tend to be international, there are a ton of good japanese games that never make it overseas because they are too difficult to understand or implement (the new jib ribbon paints japanese kanji at the sound of music), and others well.. they are simply weird. Like that japanese game where you train a polar bear to sing? feed a hamster? Or that one where you simulate a train station? or riding a subway train? (thats the gameplay actually getting in and out of a subway train)
Sometimes that "influence" gets away even in very famous games, like that infamous DOA ending where a character looks at a hedgehog and says "wheres my TINA?, TINA!!!" which is supossed to be quite hilarious... Im still trying to figure that one out.
When you create a game (if its for a console specially) you have to consider international tastes otherwise you have the risk that it will only be apreciated where it was made or worst yet look quite stupid and pointless. "Grabbed by the Ghoulies" jokes anyone? seriously that game should have an "WARNING: HUMOR FOR UK ONLY" tag.
The point is: a game like Mario or Pacman or Doom (for what is worth for) can be understood (or look just as silly) by anyone, culturization is a good thing but achieving a wider audience and universal understanding is a much better way to attract gamers and create great play experiences for all.
Go ahead MOD my day!
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